An Android Dog's Tale, Page 3

  ~*~

  105 Years Later

  (Galactic Standard Year 223553)

  A century later and twenty-four lightyears away, another planet, white, blue, and green like the first, provided the final destination of the ship’s current mission. The magnificent craft rested proudly on landing struts like delicate columns from a classic Greek temple made of silver. Time and distance took no obvious toll on the space-faring vessel. Another ship, boxy, rectangular, and strictly business, squatted nearby. It could have been the first ship’s ugly stepsister, or perhaps its ancient grandmother, if such familial relationships applied to constructed entities. They rested side by side in a field of long, fibrous grass. A herd of large, dull-eyed animals, like an ill-conceived and extremely unlikely cross between a hippopotamus, water buffalo, and wooly mammoth, grazed placidly nearby, efficiently turning the native grasses into piles of steaming brown fertilizer.

  The area around the two ships bustled like a disturbed anthill. Machines of various kinds, some resembling large gray crabs and others more like self-propelled shop-vacuum cleaners with arms, unloaded the larger and bulkier spacecraft. The motionless silver ship was busiest of all. During its century in transit, it prepared and planned the start of this new project, and now it put those plans into effect, monitoring all of the ongoing activities and directing the actions of the robots busily working in and around its boxy neighbor.

  Within a year, plants thrived nearby that never grew on this planet before. Grains and vegetables native to the planet it visited a century before photosynthesized nutrients using light from a star different from the one that fueled their evolution. Specially designed and recently manufactured robots harvested native trees. Others processed the lumber; still others carefully transplanted seedlings of completely different and unrelated trees.

  A black, elongated cube, superficially much like those that probed Earth, emerged from the survey ship. It glided noiselessly to a stream and released the first nonnative animals to attempt to create a life and a future for their species on this planet.

  The fish, hatched in one of the ship’s several bio-tanks and unaccustomed to the feel of the flowing water, floated motionless along with the current at first. Their instincts and an encouraging splash from one of the probe’s appendages soon prompted them to explore their new environment. The ship calculated the probability of them surviving to reproduce to be ninety-eight percent, and it felt pleased.

  More animals emerged from a ramp leading from an opening in the larger of the two interstellar craft. Robots herded a procession of goats, pigs, sheep, and other herbivores noted for their undiscriminating taste in food into transport craft that would take them to different areas around the planet where they could live and breed. After extensive analysis, the ship concluded that they could eat many of the native plants, and it had slightly altered the genes governing their instincts to encourage them to do so.

  All was proceeding according to plan.